BOULDER — Back in August, University of Colorado political science professors Kenneth Bickers and Michael Berry won national attention for projecting an Electoral College romp for Republican Mitt Romney based on a model relying heavily on state-level economic factors such as unemployment data and changes in personal income.

The academics later updated their estimates based on new data and gave the Republican a bigger edge — 330 Electoral College votes to President Barack Obama's 208. Bickers appeared on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor" and conservative talk radio.

On Wednesday — after the professors incorrectly forecast that Romney would sweep the battleground states that ended up carrying Obama to victory — it was time for a reckoning.

"The model was wrong," Bickers said. "Sure, that's a mea culpa I suppose. I've argued everywhere from the beginning that polls and prediction models don't vote. This gives you the historical conditions, provides a kind of baseline for information in interpreting what might happen. In that sense, I still think it's a useful tool. It didn't get the correct outcome, but it does give you the historical context."

The only battleground state correctly forecast was one of the most Republican to begin with: North Carolina.

The model erred, Bickers said, in assuming that a campaign could not shake off such challenging economic factors. One thing lacking, he said, is a good way to model campaign impact.